This week the McKinnon Institute had planned to publish its second annual index tracking the health of Australian democracy. Last year’s inaugural index served as a depressing baseline for anyone ...

Three hours into last Friday’s hearing of the parliamentary inquiry examining artificial intelligence, Nationals senator Ross Cadell asked a straightforward question about copyright. The answer he ...

Near the old Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney a stark slab of wall, angled outward from a glass background, houses a table and a leaning potato-digging spade known as a loy. The glass panels behind it are ...

One of Mao Zedong’s best-known remarks — that power grows from the barrel of a gun — helps explain why the People’s Liberation Army is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party rather than of ...

In the early 1960s, contentious talk about the injustices of the British class system was part of the stock-in-trade of Manchester pubs. Most of the talk was washed away by pints of Watney’s Red ...

“One Nation surges ahead of Labor as budget flops,” said the Australian Financial Review’s headline on Monday, and it was mostly correct. The bit about the budget is old news and entirely true. But it ...

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 93 per cent of children attend public schools. In Alberta, the province that topped Canada for reading and science in the latest round of OECD tests, ...

Bill Hayton is a journalist and historian whose career has included periods working in Asia. His decades of producing news and reportage have given him a sharp sense of what makes good stories, and a ...

For a special “best of” season we asked long-time Inside Story contributors to choose one of their favourites among the articles they’ve written for us and add a 2026 postscript. This is Hamish ...

After months of public brinkmanship, with interest groups and commentators barracking from the sidelines and the threat of a double dissolution election hanging overhead, the federal government has ...

When a determined and resourceful young man from Punjab — I’ll call him Hari — was driving me home recently, our conversation turned to his experiences and aspirations in Australia. He’d finished a ...

When another Newspoll dropped this week (51–49 in the Coalition’s favour, again) the Australian mentioned a change in how its pollsters will be estimating two-party-preferred figures between now and ...